Well, I know roughly what sprites are. They are game graphics. Let me re-phase my question.

Are sprites the sources of the game graphics or the graphic instances created during the game?

May be I am not making my question clear. Let's give an example.

If I have an action game, I have a bullet.jpg file as the graphic source of the bullets. Let's say I have my game character firing his/her machine gun. Multiple bullets are fired out from the gun, so there are many rendered instances of bullet.jpg on the screen. My question now is: Is the term "Sprite" referring to the image file on the file directory - bullet.jpg(source), or each rendered output(instance) of every bullet fired out during gameplay?

I hope I got my question put up nice and clear. Hope any experienced people will help me out on such simple matter. Thank you in advanced

This is probably the most accurate one. It contains whatever it has to contain to represent a single 2D entity graphically, usually with a single rectangular image. Common things they contain are: - a reference to an image - a position. - a rotation angle - a size (width and height). This might be implied by the size of the image, in which case you might not need it, or instead want a single scale variable, or even separate scaleX and scaleY variable.

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